Red Sox, White Sox, Black Sox, is it time to do the laundry?

It seems that curses are being lifted left and right, except the curse on the Yankees. It must pain them to see all their former pitchers winning in this year's post-season while they have now lost in the playoffs the past five years. It sure looks like the Contreras/El Duque White Sox will play the Clemens/Pettitte Astros in next week's World Series. The pick here is the White Sox in 6 games, thus ending 88 years of futility and 86 years of guilt from the 1919 Black Sox scandal. The spookiest thing about this year's post-season is Roger Clemens's mother predicting the exact score of the game he pitched the day she died (10-2 Astros) and mentioning Shoeless Joe Jackson (one of the Black Sox, and a Hall-of-Fame caliber player kept out of the Hall by his ban) three times that same day. Is Bess Clemens now a baseball god?

By the way, if Houston wins tonight, all of baseball has to wait until Saturday for the World Series to start. In the NBA, the rounds are set as soon as all the teams finish the previous round, so that this kind of gap will never happen. In NY, I'm sure that gap will be filled with more pointless stories about waiting for Joe Torre to talk about his feelings about Boss Steinbrenner. Most sportswriters here don't know what to do without the Yankees playing in the later rounds of the playoffs.